To think rationally, it is worth switching to a foreign language

People who speak several languages ​​often feel that in each of these languages ​​a new facet of their own personality is revealed to them (great assertiveness in English, sentimentality in German, etc.). Such feelings are purely individual, and they can hardly be subjected to objective verification.

On the other hand, science already has the right to assert that the same things can be morally evaluated by us in completely different ways, depending on the language in which we think and speak about them. And the point is not that one language (say, Russian) is more moral than another (say, English). The only difference is whether we talk in our own language or in a foreign one.

Our reactions in their native language is much faster, and they have no less emotion than reason. Thinking in a foreign language requires from us more attention and more work of the mind than emotions.

Spanish and American psychologists Under the direction of Albert Costa, they conducted an experiment inviting subjects to solve a moral dilemma known as the «Trolley Problem». Its essence is that you see a trolley rushing along the tracks on which five tied people lie. Next to you is a lever with which you can redirect the trolley to another track, where there is only one person. Most people respond that they would pull the lever, thus sacrificing one to save five.

But everything changes when the task is complicated. You don’t have a lever, and the only way to save five people is to push the fat man off the footbridge with your own hands to block the cart’s path.

Would you kill a fat man to save five people? In the second case, people are extremely reluctant to do this — because such a way to save five includes direct violence, and partly because one person, equipped with at least some personal characteristic (fat man), causes more emotions than the impersonal five attached.

Albert Costa and colleagues have shown that if the discussion of an acute situation was conducted in a foreign language, 50% of the respondents were ready to kill in order to save other people. Discussing the same situation in their native language, only 20% expressed the desire to push the fat man.

«This discovery can have a major impact on our globalized world, as some of us have to make important decisions in both our native and foreign languages, ”says Boaz Keisar, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.

For example, an immigrant can be invited to court as a juror, with a different approach to decision-making than a native English speaker.

In another experiment, respondents were asked to read stories in which no one was harmed, but the actions themselves were generally considered reprehensible. For example, those in which siblings engaged in consensual safe sex, or someone cooked and ate their dog after it was hit by a car. Those who read the stories in a foreign language found these acts less outrageous than those who read them in their native language.

How does a foreign language change us?

Foreign language forces we are more likely to include logic by weakening the action of the emotional sphere and moral taboos. The language that we have known since childhood is more emotionally colored for us. Our memory associates it with the ways and situations in which it was studied. Therefore, the languages ​​that were studied in situations filled with strong emotions carry a great emotional coloring for us, and those that we learned in the classroom, on our own with books or on a computer screen, are devoid of such coloring.

Freeing us from many emotions, a foreign language makes us more attentive and more logical. Paradoxically, studies show that if a complex mathematical problem is formulated in a foreign language, the number of errors due to inattention decreases significantly.

A source: broker Scientific America.